Can AI Really Be Your Co-founder?
The utopian dream? nightmare? It's how you look at it.
I’d say it’s a dream come true, but honestly, it’s a nightmare for many people to replace a human co-founder with artificial intelligence.
On one hand, there won’t be any problems or discussions between you and your co-founder.
On the other hand, well, it’s the same thing. There won’t be any discussions with your co-founder, so promoting healthy dialogue that could result in serious flaws in your business won’t exist.
If there is one thing we’ve learned about artificial intelligence in the past three years, it’s that it will try to please you no matter what. Try talking to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, and prove me wrong.
Whatever you ask them to do, they will do. If you ask them whether something is a good idea, they’re likely to say, “Oh yes, there’s a huge market opportunity.” This is a significant difference between an AI co-founder and an actual co-founder.
The Two Co-founder Factors
The reality of the entrepreneurial world is that co-founders or founders possess two important skills that distinguish them. The first is innovation and creativity. Depending on your level of business, there is always a need for creativity at the start.
The idea of a business needs to grow and be continuously fed with creativity. This requires innovation and the use of your brain.
Can you have an AI co-founder at this stage? I can’t say it’s impossible. In all honesty, speaking to GPT—especially in advanced voice mode—could create a persona that thinks alongside you. However, it won’t be a co-founder; it will be more of an assistant. A co-founder has to challenge what you’re saying and think from a different perspective, and that’s the beauty of the business world. While we can say that artificial intelligence could potentially aid in this area, it cannot dominate it.
The second aspect of co-founding a company is the execution part—how to execute tasks perfectly. This is what actually makes or breaks in entrepreneurship. You could have a wonderful business idea, but without proper execution, it is bound to fail.
A good example is Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. He possesses excellent execution skills that led Apple to become the world’s most valuable company. To the business world, Tim Cook is a genius who achieves what most people cannot.
It’s not the era of accidental entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg; it’s more about execution. Are people in their nine-to-five roles executing properly? Are they waking up and working according to KPIs? Is there growth happening? All these questions contribute to a company’s successful trajectory. Co-founders are essential elements of this execution cycle.
If you have a CTO co-founder, you need them to work efficiently to achieve the vision of your platform. Unfortunately, when it comes to execution, artificial intelligence does quite the good job. The downside for humans is that you cannot predict their actions due to their imperfections, which is the beauty of humankind. However, you can always rely on AI tools to deliver what they should at the right time.
If you ask GPT a question, it will answer immediately.
If you ask it to do something, it will execute that task on spot.
The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence
Year after year, artificial intelligence is learning. At the moment, it is not the perfect execution team member, especially in development; for example, it cannot replace your CTO. But give it a few years, and it most likely could.
So, let’s circle back to the question.
Could AI become your co-founder?
If you’re looking for a co-founder to execute tasks or help with the execution part of your business idea, AI has the potential to do so—and if not now, then in a few years, that’s for sure.
However, if you’re looking for a co-founder to help you grow an idea from scratch with their critical thinking and creativity, science has not yet shown that artificial intelligence could excel in this area.
Hence, if you have the option, stick with human co-founders for now, but keep an eye on artificial intelligence as a future co-founder.
This is a great philosophical exploration. Wondering. . . do you think you might get better results out of the innovation/creativity exercise if you could provide a system prompt instructing the LLM to be critical as needed, and not be afraid to offer a perspective that may not be pleasing in the short-term. I'm curious whether it could process that type of prompt in a productive way.